Comment 12 for bug 1567219

(In reply to Роман Донченко from comment #9)
> > Do we need to move this forward? Is .zdebug gaining mainstream acceptance?
>
> Yes and yes. Debian now defaults to compressing their debugging symbols
> (this change was made in debhelper v9, if anyone's curious).

Debian does not seems to use GNU .zdebug compression, but a different kind of ELF section compression. They seem to have adopted the new ELF standardized SHF_COMPRESSED variant. Which is somewhat strange since I don't believe any release of binutils, nor elfutils, supports that yet (it will be in binutils 2.26 and elfutils 0.165, but those have not yet been released). So effectively nothing supports that kind of ELF section compression yet.

It is also a bit questionable whether this kind of compression of debug sections is really beneficial. It prevents easy indexing and lazy loading of data, causing huge startup delays whenever any debuginfo is needed. It would be better to adopt dwz style compression.

> On x86_64 you can at least get call stacks, since .eh_frame is mandatory,
> but on, say, ARM or ARM64 it's not. So the call stacks stop at the first
> C-only library.

That is a different Debian bug though, gcc: Enable -fasynchronous-unwind-tables on more arches: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=746426